Chapter 6
Anaphoric reference in Early Modern English
The case of said and same
Work on the anaphoric NPs the said + N and the same has shown that both were frequent in sixteenth-century English but declined afterwards. We address the question why this happened. After reviewing earlier work on the two constructions, we present data showing that their properties and development are too dissimilar to assume that they declined for the same reason. Instead, we identify for each of the changes two separate causal factors, which involve tension between form and meaning of the anaphor. In exploring these case histories, we also offer some discussion of the general kinds of explanations that have been proposed for the decline of linguistic forms and constructions, which is an aspect of language change that deserves more systematic investigation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Background
- 2.1
Background to the said + N
- 2.2
Background to the same
- 3.Further data: Frequency and distance
- 3.1The frequency of said and same in EModE: Methodology
- 3.2The frequency of said and same in EModE: Results
- 3.3The distance of said and same in EModE
- 4.The decline of said and same
: Causation
- 4.1The decline of said
: Wrong word, wrong place
- 4.2The decline of same
: Too costly, too long
- 5.Conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
Notes
-
References
References (112)
References
Alrenga, Peter. 2006. Scalar (non-)identity and similarity. In Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Donald Baumer, David Montero & Michael Scanlon (eds), 49–57. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.
Ariel, Mira. 1990. Accessing Noun-Phrase Antecedents. London: Routledge.
Ariel, Mira. 1994. Interpreting anaphoric expressions: a cognitive versus a pragmatic approach. Journal of Linguistics 30: 3–42.
Ariel, Mira. 2004. Accessibility marking: Discourse functions, discourse profiles, and processing cues. Discourse Processes 37: 91–116.
Ariel, Mira. 2008. Pragmatics and Grammar. Cambridge: CUP.
Beaver, David I. & Clark, Brady Z. 2008, Sense and Sensitivity: How Focus Determines Meaning. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Biber, Douglas, Johansson, Stig, Leech, Geoffrey, Conrad, Susan & Finegan, Edward. 1999. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Pearson Education.
BNC: British National Corpus. Davies, Mark. 2004-. BYU-BNC. (Based on the British National Corpus from Oxford University Press). <[URL]>
Bolinger, Dwight. 1967. Adjectives in English: Attribution and predication. Lingua 18: 1–34.
Breban, Tine. 2010a. English Adjectives of Comparison: Lexical and Grammaticalized Uses. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Breban, Tine. 2010b. Reconstructing paths of secondary grammaticalisation of same from emphasising to phoricity and single-referent-marking postdeterminer uses. Transactions of the Philological Society 108: 68–87.
Breban, Tine. 2012. Functional shifts and the development of English determiners. In Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of English, Anneli Meurman-Solin, María J. López-Couso & Bettelou Los (eds), 271–300. Oxford: OUP.
Breban, Tine. 2014. What is secondary grammaticalization? Trying to see the wood for the trees in a confusion of interpretations. Folia Linguistica 48: 469–502.
Brie, Friedrich W. D. 1906–1908. The Brut or The Chronicles of England, Edited from Ms. Rawl. B 171, Bodleian Library, 2 vols [Early English Text Society, O.S. 131, 136]. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner.
Brinton, Laurel J. & Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2005. Lexicalization and Language Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Britain, David. 2002. Space and spatial diffusion. In The Handbook of Language Variation and Change, Jack K. Chambers, Peter Trudgill & Natalie Schilling-Estes (eds), 603–637. Oxford: Blackwell.
Büring, Daniel. 2005. Binding Theory. Cambridge: CUP.
Burnley, David. 1992. Lexis and semantics. In The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 2: 1066–1476, Norman Blake (ed.), 409–499. Cambridge: CUP.
Bybee, Joan. 2015. Language Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Bybee, Joan & Pagliuca, William. 1985. Cross-linguistic comparison and the development of grammatical meaning. In Historical Semantics – Historical Word-Formation, Jacek Fisiak (ed.), 59–83. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Campbell, Lyle. 2001. What’s wrong with grammaticalization? Language Sciences 23: 113–161.
Chafe, Wallace L. 1996. Inferring identifiability and accessibility. In Reference and Referent Accessibility [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 38], Thorstein Fretheim & Jeanette K. Gundel (eds), 37–46. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chomsky, Noam. 1980. On binding. Linguistic Inquiry 11: 1–46.
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
Christiansen, Morten H. & Chater, Nick. 2016. The Now-or-Never bottleneck: A fundamental constraint on language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 39. .
Claridge, Claudia. 2012. Linguistic levels: Styles, registers, genres, text types. In English Historical Linguistics: An International Handbook, Vol. 1, Alexander Bergs & Laurel Brinton (eds), 237–253. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Cornish, Francis. 1999. Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding. Oxford: OUP.
De Smet, Hendrik. 2014. Does innovation need reanalysis? In Usage-Based Approaches to Language Change [Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics 69], Evie Coussé & Ferdinand von Mengden (eds), 23–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
De Smet, Hendrik & Fischer, Olga C. M. 2017. The role of analogy in language change: Supporting constructions. In The Changing English Language: Psycholinguistic Perspectives, Marianne Hundt, Sandra Mollin & Simone E. Pfenninger (eds), 240–268. Cambridge: CUP.
De Smet, Hendrik & Heyvaert, Liesbet. 2010. The meaning of the English present participle. English Language and Linguistics 15: 473–498.
EEBO: Early English Books Online. <[URL]>
Filipović, Luna & Hawkins, John. 2016. English article usage as a window on the meanings of same, identical and similar
. English Language and Linguistics 20: 295–313.
Fischer, Olga C. M. 2006. On the position of adjectives in Middle English. English Language and Linguistics 10: 253–288.
Fischer, Olga C. M., De Smet, Hendrik & van der Wurff, Wim. 2017. A Brief History of English Syntax. Cambridge: CUP.
Fitzmaurice, Susan, Alexander, Marc, Pidd, Michael, Robinson, Justyna, Dallachy, Fraser, Hine, Iona, Mehl, Seth, Aitken, Brian, Groves, Matthew & Rogers, Katherine. 2016. Linguistic DNA: Modelling concepts and semantic change in English, 1500–1800. Paper presented at Digital Humanities 2016 Conference, Kraków, July 2016. Abstract available online at <[URL]>
Fox, Barbara A. 1987. Discourse Structure and Anaphora: Written and Conversational English. Cambridge: CUP.
Fries, Udo. 1994. Text deixis in Early Modern English. In Studies in Early Modern English, Dieter Kastovsky (ed.), 111–128. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Garner, Bryan. 2011. Garner’s Dictionary of Legal Usage, 3rd edn. Oxford: OUP.
Givón, Talmy. 1992. The grammar of referential coherence as mental processing instructions. Linguistics 30: 5–55.
Grossmann, James. 2012. Contribution to internet forum, posted on 22 June 2012, 2:58, on the topic ‘Can the word “said” be a determiner in written English?’. <[URL]>
Gundel, Jeanette K., Hedberg, Nancy & Zacharski, Ron. 1993. Cognitive status and the form of referring expressions in discourse. Language 69: 274–307.
Haas, Florian. 2009. Reciprocity in English: Historical Development and Synchronic Structure. London: Routledge.
Halliday, Michael A. K. & Hasan, Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. Harlow: Longman.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. Explaining the ditransitive person-role constraint: A usage-based account. Constructions 2. <[URL]>.
Haspelmath, Martin. 2009. Lexical borrowing: Concepts and issues. In Loanwords in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook, Martin Haspelmath & Uri Tadmor (eds), 35–54. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2002. World Lexicon of Grammaticalization. Cambridge: CUP.
Heine, Bernd & Kuteva, Tania. 2005. Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Heine, Bernd & Reh, Mechthild. 1984. Grammaticalization and Reanalysis in African Languages. Hamburg: Helmut Buske.
Heine, Bernd & Song, Kyung-an. 2011. On the grammaticalization of personal pronouns. Journal of Linguistics 47: 587–630.
Hoekstra, Eric & Slofstra, Bouke. 2013. A diachronic study of the negative polarity item syn leven ‘his life > ever’ in West Frisian between 1550 and 1800. Language 89(4): e39–e55.
Huang, Yan. 2000. Anaphora: A Cross-Linguistic Study. Oxford: OUP.
Hundt, Marianne. 2014. The demise of the being to V construction. Transactions of the Philological Society 112: 167–187.
Juge, Matthew L. 2007. Metaphor and teleology do not drive grammaticalization. In Historical Linguistics 2005: Selected papers from the 17th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Madison, Wisconsin, 31 July – 5 August 2005 [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 284], Joseph C. Salmons & Shannon Dubenion-Smith (eds), 33–48. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Keenan, Edward. 2002. Explaining the creation of reflexive pronouns in English. In Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective, Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell (eds), 325–354. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kibrik, Andrej A. 2011. Reference in Discourse. Oxford: OUP.
Kilpiö, Matti. 1997. Participial adjectives with anaphoric reference of the type the said, the (a)forementioned from Old to Early Modern English: The evidence of the Helsinki Corpus. In Studies in the Changing English Language in Honour of Matti Rissanen [Mémoires de la Société Linguistique de Helsinki 52], Terttu Nevalainen & Lena Kahlas-Tarkka (eds), 77–100. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Komen, Erwin R. 2011. Average referential distance. MS, Radboud University Nijmegen. <[URL]>.
Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1: 199–244.
Kroch, Anthony. 1994. Morphosyntactic variation. In Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society: Parasession on Variation and Linguistic Theory, Katharine Beals (ed.), 180–201. Chicago IL: Chicago Linguistic Society.
Kytö, Merja. 2010. Data in historical pragmatics. In Historical Pragmatics [Handbooks of Pragmatics 8], Andreas Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds), 33–67. Berlin: De Gruyter.
Laitinen, Mikko. 2008. Sociolinguistic patterns in grammaticalization: He, they, and those in human indefinite reference. Language Variation and Change 20: 155–185.
Langacker, Ronald W. 2010. A lot of quantifiers. In Empirical and Experimental Methods in Cognitive/Functional Research, Sally Rice & John Newman (eds), 41–57. Stanford CA: CSLI.
Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara. 2008. Asymmetries in participial modification. In Asymmetric Events [Converging Evidence in Language and Communication Research 11], Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk (ed.), 261–282. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Lightfoot, David. 1990. Obsolescence and universal grammar. In Papers from the 5th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 65], Sylvia M. Adamson, Vivien A. Law, Nigel Vincent & Susan Wright (eds), 281–292. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Linguistic DNA: A collaborative research project of the universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and Sussex on semantic-conceptual change in English 1500–1800. <[URL]>
Matras, Yaron. 2007. The borrowability of grammatical categories. In Grammatical Borrowing in Cross-Linguistic Perspective, Yaron Matras & Jeanette S. Sakel (eds), 31–73. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Matthews, Peter H. 2014. The Positions of Adjectives in English. Oxford: OUP.
Matushansky, Ora. 2010.
Same problem, different solution. MS, University of Utrecht. <[URL]>
MED: Middle English Dictionary. <[URL]>
Mellinkoff, David. 1963. The Language of the Law. Boston MA: Little, Brown & Co.
Miller, George A., Newman, E. B. & Friedman, E. A. 1958. Length-frequency statistics for written English. Information and Control 1: 370–389.
Mind Bending Grammars: Research project at the University of Antwerp on change in the grammars of 17th-century individuals. <[URL]>
Mortelmans, Jesse. 2006.
Ledit vs le démonstratif en moyen français: Quels contextes d’emploi ? Langue française 152(4): 70–81.
Nevalainen, Terttu. 1999. The facts and nothing but: The (non-)grammaticalisation of negative exclusives in English. In Negation in the History of English, Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Gunnel Tottie & Wim van der Wurff (eds), 167–187. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Nevalainen, Terttu. 2014. Norms and usage in seventeenth-century English. In Norms and Usage in Language History, 1600–1900: A Sociolinguistic and Comparative Perspective [Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics 3], Gijsbert Rutten, Rik Vosters & Wim Vandenbussche (eds), 103–128. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Nevalainen, Terttu & Raumolin-Brunberg, Helena. 1994.
Its strength and the beauty of it: The standardization of the third person neuter possessive in Early Modern English. In Towards a Standard English, 1600–1800, Dieter Stein & Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade (eds), 171–216. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
OED: Oxford English Dictionary. <[URL]>
Österman, Aune. 2001. “Where your Treasure is, There is your Heart”: A Corpus-Based Study of There Compounds and There/Where Subordinators in the History of English [Memoires de la Société Néophilologique de Helsinki 59]. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique.
Petré, Peter & Van de Velde, Freek. 2015. Differences and similarities between individuals in ongoing grammaticalisation. Paper presented at International Conference on Historical Linguistics 22, Naples, July 2015. <[URL]>
Pollard, Carl & Sag, Ivan A. 1992. Anaphors in English and the scope of binding theory. Linguistic Inquiry 23: 261–303.
Postma, Gertjan. 2010. The impact of failed changes. In Continuity and Change in Grammar [Linguistik Aktuesll/Linguistics Today 159], Christopher Lucas, Sheila Watts, Anne Breitbarth & David Willis (eds), 269–302. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Prince, Ellen. 1981. Toward a taxonomy of given-new information. In Radical Pragmatics, Peter Cole (ed.), 223–255. New York NY: Academic Press.
Quirk, Randolph, Greenbaum, Sidney, Geoffrey, Leech & Svartvik, Jan. 1985. A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Radden, Günter & Dirven, René. 2007. Cognitive English Grammar [Cognitive Linguistics in Practice 2]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reinhart, Tanja & Reuland, Eric. 1993. Reflexivity. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 657–720.
Rissanen, Matti. 1999. Syntax. In Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. 3: 1476–1776, Roger Lass (ed.), 187–331. Cambridge: CUP.
Ritt, Nikolaus. 2004. Selfish Sounds and Linguistic Evolution: A Darwinian Approach to Language Change. Cambridge: CUP.
Roberts, Ian. 2007. Diachronic Syntax. Oxford: OUP.
Rooth, Mats 1992. A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics 1: 75–116.
Scotto di Carlo, Giuseppina. 2015. Diachronic and Synchronic Aspects of Legal English: Past, Present, and Possible Future of Legal English. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.
Sinar, Beck. 2006. A History of English Reflexives: From Old English into Early Modern English. PhD dissertation, University of York. <[URL]>
Sleeman, Petra. 2011. Verbal and adjectival participles: Position and internal structure. Lingua 121: 1569–1587.
Tiersma, Peter M. 1999. Legal Language. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs. 2010. Dialogic contexts as motivations for syntactic change. In Variation and Change in English Grammar and Lexicon, Robert A. Cloutier, Anne Marie Hamilton-Brehm & William Kretzschmar (eds), 11–27. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Traugott, Elizabeth Closs & Trousdale, Graeme. 2013. Constructionalization and Constructional Changes. Oxford: OUP.
Vartiainen, Turo. 2016 A constructionist approach to category change: Constraining factors in the adjectivization of participles. Journal of English Linguistics 44: 34–60.
Warner, Anthony. 1997. The structure of parametric change, and V-movement in the history of English. In Parameters of Morphosyntactic Change, Ans van Kemenade & Nigel Vincent (eds), 380–393. Cambridge: CUP.
Wichmann, Anne. 2011. Grammaticalization and prosody. In The Oxford Handbook of Grammaticalization, Heiko Narrog & Bernd Heine (eds), 331–341. Oxford: OUP.
Cited by (3)
Cited by three other publications
Wallage, Phillip & Wim van der Wurff
2024.
On analysing fragments: the case of No?.
Linguistics
Pinson, Mathilde
2023.
Decompositionalization and Partial Recompositionalization: The Emergence of by the Same Token as a Polyfunctional Discourse Marker.
Journal of English Linguistics 51:3
► pp. 236 ff.
Kranich, Svenja & Tine Breban
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 15 september 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.